External hyphenation engine

[Tamas Papp]

Hi,

Could you include support for an external hyphenation engine into
lout? The problem with the traditional TeX-like hyphenation is that
it's not flexible enough to support languages with weird hyphenation
patterns.

One problem is that some languages give precedence to word boundaries
in compound words when hyphenating them (Hungarian and German come to
my mind, though I'm not sure about the latter.) TeX-like systems use
long exception lists to handle this, but it's not a good solution: it
will either let incorrect hyphenations take place, or miss good
hyphenation points.

The second problem is with sounds denoted by two or more letters (like
ch in German, or sh in English.) In Hungarian, when one doubles these
sounds, only the first character is repeated. (eg. cch, not chch, or
ssh, not shsh). The catch is that when hyphenating them, the lost
character reappears, so ...cch... becomes ...ch-ch..., etc. 

I don't know if other languages have similar problems, though. But if
it's not too much trouble, lout could be made to call an external
binary. Perhaps with a simple interface, maybe a pipe on stdin/stdout,
would be enough. Lout would just give the words, one in each line, eg.

correction
gastronomy

and the program would return the list of all possible hyphenation
points, separated by space, eg.

cor-rection correc-tion
gast-ronomy gastro-nomy

I'm willing to write such an external hyphenation program (under GPL,
obviously) if someone included the support to lout.

Regards,

Tamas